


Growing Up Evan

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Foxtrot [84]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-28 00:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6305599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: Stargate Atlantis, Evan Lorne, <i>Daddy's flown across the ocean / Leaving just a memory / A snap shot in the family album / Daddy what else did you leave for me?</i></p><p>Set pre-series, and pre-SG-1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing Up Evan

Natalia and Mom thought Evan didn't know, but he found out when he was twelve: his father had been a soldier. Mom had gone to great lengths to hide that particular truth from him. None of the other moms or dads on the commune would talk about his father. One time, Mama June had told Evan that he looked so much like his father, that one day he'd grow up to be just as handsome, and then Mom had found out, and Mama June hadn't spoken to him for a week after that. (Evan had one picture of his father, from the day he committed to Mom, and he didn't think he looked like his father at all.) Evan had assumed, as everyone had let him, that no one talked about his father because talking about him made Mom sad. And it did.  
  
But when Evan turned twelve, when he was digging through the attic to find some decorations to put in the yard for his birthday party, he found the box. Small, gunmetal gray, with a broken latch. Inside it was a passport, a photo of a soldier in a uniform, and dog tags. The dog tags belonged to one Lorne, Alexander Evan.  
  
Evan's father had been a soldier. He'd fought in Vietnam, if the stamps in his passport were accurate.  
  
And suddenly Evan's world made a little more sense. He wasn't broken for wanting to grow up and a soldier, be a fighter pilot, to see the wide world and help people and maybe save people. He was simply his father's son. When the other moms and dads on the commune looked ill-at-ease when Evan explained what he wanted to be when he grew up, they saw echoes of his father in him. Soldier. Baby-killer. But Evan had always known it wasn't that simple, that being a soldier was more than just following orders. It was being part of something bigger than himself, something more tangible than the spirituality and oneness the other moms and dads described when they sat around in circles, singing and playing music and getting a little stoned.  
  
Grandma and Natalia and Mom were perfect for life on the commune, with their peacefulness and artistic ways, but Evan couldn't stay there forever. So he put the box away exactly where he found it as he found it, found decorations for his birthday party, and went downstairs. He bided his time for the next six years, learned to draw and paint and sculpt and do all the art Mom could, all the baking Grandma could. He learned to keep his gaze politely averted when he helped Natalia give her friends henna tattoos during their sleepovers. His senior year of high school, he applied at schools all across California to get into a surveyor program, because that was a useful skill, one he could fall back on after he retired from the military. And when he turned eighteen, he signed up for the Air Force ROTC, because they would help pay for school, and best of all, they would help him get his wings.  
  
Grandma and Natalia cried when he told them. The news spread across the commune like wildfire, and Evan knew his mother and sister and grandmother would be pariahs for at least a month, and for one moment he fiercely, fiercely hated the people who'd tried to make him into something he wasn't supposed to be. But Mom hugged him and said she loved him and walked him to the bus stop so he could go to summertime basic training before college started in the fall.  
  
When he got to his barracks and finally got to unpack, he found a small travel watercolor kit on top of the clothes in his duffel bag, and tucked inside it were his father's dogtags.


End file.
